I tend to not get too excited about games before I actually had a chance to play them, a policy that has served me well over the years. But as I didn't get a SWTOR beta invite before the end November weekend where everybody got to play, I ended up missing a lot of the stuff that EA Bioware offered before that. Like their pre-launch guild program. I wouldn't call it a major feature, but it sure is nice to be able to sign up for your guild before the game even launches. As I understood it, I'll get a mail telling me which server my guild will be on, and will get an automatic guild invite for the first character created on that server. That is the sort of comfort function I like.

Nearly 7 years ago, on the European launch day of World of Warcraft, I was one of the initial signatories of a guild I had met in the EQ2 beta. Except for some guild drama episodes, breaks from WoW, and characters created on other servers, I have been with that guild for all these years. So I am very happy to report that I will be playing Star Wars: The Old Republic with them, on an European RP-PvE server.

I avoided the pre-launch guild process because the whole "Bioware picks your server for you" aspect of it bothered me. I was on a ton of crappy servers during my time in WoW and the thought of being stuck on a bad one in TOR bugged me. But looking back, that was a little shortsighted on my part. Now I have to scramble with the masses and filter through all the noise to try and pick up a guild at launch. Oh well, lesson learned.

I'm disappointed; I was going to try to recruit you to a blogger-ish guild. Seriously, though I'm liking the functionality as well, as it both helps coordinate people who might not be starting / playing / available to reach at the same time, and I've had plenty of "What server are you on?" errors in the past due to key people in my social circle living in caves.

Is there a way to change the guild name after you have created it? A friend of mine created a guild but the name he chose was too unoriginal so I told him to change it, but he cannot figure out how. Anyone know if this is possible?

Congrats on 7 years with the same guild Tobold. I wish Guilds were an overlay that could be placed on top of every/any game, but alas my wandering feet has meant 2 years was the longest I could muster with any one guild. I'm quite envious.

The ally/adversary system for guilds has allowed Oceania players to work together in an attempt to gain unofficial Oceanic servers at launch, despite SWTOR not being supported in our regions. The two PVE and PVP daisychains have 24 guilds each, and over 1,100 player accounts taking part. The risk to this is that when all the unguilded Oceania players log on, we might overwhelm the servers, as was the case with Blackrock when WoW launched.

Is it possible to get some information on your guild or even possibly join it?

Short answer: No.

Long answer: It is inevitable that over the course of years in a guild there are differences of opinion, and sometimes even guild drama. Those are best kept internal. Thus I agreed to not blog about my guild, not write about about the names of the guild or of guild members, so as not to make internal conflict public.

One of my favorite features of the pre-launch guild creation was the Ally and Adversaries feature. I have a small friends and family only guild that has the possibility of several children playing with us and a separate, more mature guild of dedicated gamers that I have played with for years. Thanks to the pre-launch guild creation much of the work of getting them onto the same server from the start of the game can be done by Bioware, leaving me free to enjoy launch all the more.